Many people assume that the first introduction of Christianity to the Chinese was part of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. In fact, Syriac-speaking Christians brought the gospel along the Silk Road into China in the seventh century. Glen L. Thompson introduces readers to the fascinating history of this early Eastern church, referred to as Ji…

I Know Chaucer Is SomebodyDi Ancient & New

One of my great privileges is being on mission with Bridget Schulz. She actually moved across state lines and changed jobs mid-career because of... Catholic schools! She is now the principal of our parish school, St. Maximilian Kolbe Academy. In this episode, she joins me on the podcast to share why she is so passionate about Catholic Classical edu…

Di Johanna Hanink

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the opening days of February 152 Artefacts Returned From Turkey Dr Kenneth Kitchen PTAH Symposium in Luxor I Spent 100 Hours Inside The Pyramids! I Spent 100 Hours Inside The Pyramids! - YouTube These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.or…

At the end of Eric Cline's bestselling history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce,…

An Ode To OtisDi Ancient & New

Fr. K joins Cosden to discuss the question that no one wants to discuss: what are the parameters in which a couple can use Natural Family Planning? They may not solve all the problems or answer all the questions, but they bring up a lot of good food for thought.

Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped build an empire From plebeians refusing to join the Roman army to bakers withholding bread, this is the first book to explore how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion t…

Why Cicero Matters (Bloomsbury, 2023) shows us how the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius, better known as Cicero, can help realize a new political world. His impact on humanitarianism, the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers of America is immense. Yet we give Julius Caesar all our attention. Why? What does this say about modern poli…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the last days of January Karnak's Montu Temple Braille Cards for Imhotep Museum GEM Opening Date Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs Kom el-Negus Dated to New Kingdom Ramesseum Restoration Begins Egyptian Blue Ingot Found in Rome Osireion Entrance Fee Now LE 40,000 These news stories are taken …

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history …

A Distempered RaccoonDi Ancient & New

Cosmology and cosmic journeys play a significant role in biblical and extra-biblical texts, especially in apocalyptic narratives. What about for the book of Revelation? The answer is yes. Join us as we speak with Joel Rothman about his recent book, The Cosmic Journey in the Book of Revelation: Apocalyptic Cosmology and the Experience of Story-Space…

What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karenleigh Overmann proposes a novel answer to these timeless questions. Tune in as we talk with Karenleigh Overmann about her book, The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Anc…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the fourth week of 2025. GEM Opening Hours 2 Smugglers Arrested in Beni Suef AUC and GEM to Offer Tour Guide and Photography Courses Launch of Association of the Guardians of Egypt Civilization Rameses in Japan These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://…

In this episode we delve into one of the most profound and enduring works of sacred poetry: the Book of Psalms. Emotional and spiritual, joyful and despairing, triumphant and trembling with terror, the psalms have given voice to humanity's deepest yearnings for millennia. These timeless prayers and hymns have offered solace, inspiration, and a path…

Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh Universit…

Consider Me Miles DavisDi Ancient & New

Andromache Karanika joins me in the Lesche to discuss how we can detect traces of wedding poetics in early Greek literature, especially poetry (hexamter and lyric). Andromache is the author of Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry (OUP 2024). Primary texts Iliad, esp. the Teikhoskopeia (Book 3) and the Deception of Zeus (Book 14)…

When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (U California Press, 2023) investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael R…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the second week of 2025. Updates to Griffith Institute Archive Is This the Skull of Arsinoe IV? Aswan Necropolis Makes Archeaology Magazine Top 10 Marble Head found at Taposiris Magna These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal…

Long Live The BreadBoxDi Ancient & New

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the second week of 2025. Tomb of Physician Teti Neb Fu at Saqqara Coffin of Priestess on Show in Madrid Luxor Discoveries at Deir el-Bahri These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/…

What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024), Chaya T. Halberstam challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, …

From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2024), Richard Davis offers a history of Indi…

Struck In SoHoDi Ancient & New

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between repr…

James Diggle joins me in the Lesche to discuss the 2021 Cambridge Greek Lexicon (2 vols.) of which he was editor-and-chief. We discuss why it was time for this sort of thing (and why it took 24 years to complete), how to use it, and why it improves on LSJ ... plus, how the team approached translating some of the naughtier words. Some links 'Liddell…

Based on an understanding of scholasticism as a cross-cultural phenomenon, undertaken by rabbinic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian scholars in late antiquity, this book examines the development of Palestinian rabbinic compilations from social-historical and literary-historical perspectives. Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholastic…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the first days of 2025. Middle Kingdom Discovery in Luxor Old,New Kingdom Discoveries at Saqqara BM Animal Mummy Exhibition Planned These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/tag/cai…

Chad Koppes was a long time Methodist minister, when the "woke" culture finally woke him up and he walked out. In this episode Chad shares his conversion story as well some of his insights into the state of Protestantism today.

Why yet another book on the Manusmriti? In From Fire To Light: Rereading the Manusmriti (Harper Collins, 2024), acclaimed academic Arvind Sharma argues that the present understanding of the Manusmriti - regarded as a text designed by the higher castes, especially brahmanas, to oppress the lower castes and women - only tells one side of the story. A…

Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the last week of December. Christie's Auction Abu Qir Bay Thieves Caught Mummy DNA Carried the Black Death These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/tag/cairo/ http://www.egyptindep…

I had a great conversation with almost-Dr. Henry Wickus about the intellectual life, the importance of philosophy in the study of theology, and some behind the scenes of what he is learning as he dives deep into writing his dissertation on the Franciscans.

Christ's Torah: The Making of the New Testament in the Second Century (Routledge, 2023) explores the creation of the collection now known as the New Testament. While it is generally accepted that it did not emerge as a collection prior to the late second century CE, a more controversial question is how it came to be. How did the writings that make …

John Ma joins me in the Lesche to discuss the longue durée of the Greek polis. John is the author of the new, monumental, and much anticipated book Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (Princeton 2024). Happy Holidays! About our guest John Ma was born in New York of Chinese parents. He…

The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Chris…

What did it mean for ordinary believers to live a Christian life in late antiquity? In Christians at Home: John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fourth-Century Antioch (Penn State University Press, 2024), Blake Leyerle explores this question through the writings, teachings, and reception of John Chrysostom—a priest of Antioch who went on to becom…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the third week of December. December Museum Highlights Karnak Winter Solstice MrBeast and the Giza Plateau These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/tag/cairo/ http://www.egyptindep…

Light The Lamp, Not The Rat!Di Ancient & New

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the second week of December. Black Market Antiquities Ancient Perfumes Exhibition GEM Volunteer Program Artefacts Returned from Ireland New Minya Discoveries Giza Plateau Revamp These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Her…

Leyla Ozgur Alhassen’s book Qur’anic Stories: God, Revelation and the Audience (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) provides excellent analyses of several Qur’anic surahs, or chapters, to explore how Qur’anic stories function as narratives – but not just any kind of narratives: narratives with a theological purpose behind them. The specific stories s…

(Spoiler alert! This episode is jam-packed with plot spoilers for THE RETURN.) Homeric scholar Barbara Graziosi joins me in the Lesche to discuss Umberto Pasolini's THE RETURN, a film dramatization of the second half of the Odyssey starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. About our guest Barbara Graziosi is Department Ch…

Playlist Super SpyDi Ancient & New

Starting nearly a thousand years ago at the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo, worn-out books and scrolls were put in the genizah, a storage area for sacred texts. In The Illustrated Cairo Genizah: A Visual Tour of Cairo Genizah Manuscripts at Cambridge Univertity Library (Gorgias Press, 2024), Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee tell the story of…

Emma Greensmith and Tim Whitmarsh join me in the Lesche to discuss how Imperial Greek epic fits into our understanding of Ancient Greek epic as a whole. Emma has just edited the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic, and she was also a member of the research project Greek Epic of the Roman Empire: A Cultural History, which Tim directed. About o…

Cosden and Fr. K break open one of C.S. Lewis's finest books, The Great Divorce.

The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one’s last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text amo…